24-25 October, Portland, OR (USA)

The Game Changers of 2016

Overview

The TAUS Annual Conference is the once a year event where industry insiders and newcomers meet to get the pulse of the translation industry and discuss strategies and opportunities for collaboration. Focus is crucial. We come together to understand the issues, and where possible work on solutions. People attending the TAUS conference gain knowledge and valuable contacts. The themes discussed at the TAUS Annual Conference 2016 are the themes that really matter: people, technology, data, how we measure quality, the customer, machine translation, speech-to-speech and innovation.

See the program overview on the topics tab and check the agenda tab for the details and latest overview of speakers.

Flow and Format of the Meeting

To stimulate the open and interactive atmosphere of the event the conference room is set up in cabaret style (round tables). The audience at the TAUS Annual Conference is capped at 120. In the mornings of both days we have plenary sessions with short presentations and Q&A sessions with the audience. In the afternoons of both days the audience splits up for more interactive sessions with panel discussions on the same topics. One group will stay in the classic conference room, the other group will go to the historical wooden-paneled library room. After the afternoon refreshment break everyone reconvenes for a continuation of the plenary session. The session leaders of the parallel tracks will give a short summary of the outcome of the discussions. A highlight at the conference is the TAUS Game Changer Innovation Award. On both afternoons the audience will be asked to select a winner from ten bright and innovative technology platforms for the translation industry.

Networking

Networking and establishing new business contacts is a key value at the TAUS events. Attendees are welcomed for coffee, juice and croissants to meet and greet people about a half hour before the conference program officially starts. The breaks and lunches all take place in the large conference room where everyone will have the opportunity to talk with everyone throughout the two days. On the Monday evening all participants are invited for a special evening with the TAUS Haus band in a characteristic old rock club downtown Portland. And if you feel like it you can join in one of the jam sessions with your instrument or voice. See the next tabs for more information.

QE Summit

On the Wednesday (October 26) directly following the Annual Conference a one-day QE Summit will be held at Intel’s headquarters just outside Portland. Transportation will be provided. For more details about this program, please check out the QE Summit pages.

Topics

People – The Future Does Not Need Translators

The future does not need translators, at least not in the old way. That was the conclusion of the ‘Future’ panel in Dublin. The future may not even need post-editors, as we see the MT engines getting better on the one hand and the audience becoming more forgiving for lesser quality of fast-moving content on the other hand. So, what do we need? By the time the lights in the old translation shop are switched off, what are the talents that we are looking for? We still need literary translators and ‘transcreators’ (don’t expect MT to take on poetry, literature, marketing slogans and copyrighting successfully).

Questions that many of us ask regularly. No other industry lends itself so beautifully – it seems – for cloud IT architectures. The cloud as the delivery channel, the cloud as the host of all our data, the cloud to link up all our vendors and freelance translators around the world, while keeping our translation data and project data always available to us, the cloud as the vehicle for the Human Language Project. But what are the risks attached to the cloud and how do we tackle them? And then there is the question whether you should build or buy your tools. It is tempting to build a tool directly tailored to your needs and IT architecture, but what are the costs and risks down the road?

Those who still rely (solely) on human judgment and intuition when it comes to finding the best translator for the job, deciding what to translate and what not, which technology to use for which content, will find themselves outpaced by data-driven platforms. The datafication of translation began a few years ago and is now in full swing. In the ‘Machine Learning’ session in Dublin, led by Adam LaMontagne from Moravia, participants enthusiastically listed all the data that we could track to make our daily work more efficient. The desired data range from the number or words and edits per hour to the temperature and weather in the translator’s location. On our to-do list is exploring how we, as an industry, can collaborate identifying data, decide on metrics and extract intelligence.

So much has been said about measuring translation, it has become a no-brainer. At the seventh TAUS QE Summit (hosted by Microsoft this time) and at the Industry Leaders Forum in Dublin participants called for action to become transparent about translation quality and productivity and to adopt the common DQF metrics. Several translation technology companies (SDL, XTM, MateCat) presented their integrations with DQF. A special DQF Enterprise User Group was formed in Dublin that will work together to meet the requirement for data privacy, customized reporting and industry benchmarking for bigger global users of DQF. Good progress but there is a lot more work to do.

The Customer – It’s Not About ‘You’: The International Customer Experience

We have all become so absorbed by our own methods and processes of localization that we have lost touch with the real customer: the end-user. Now, more than ever, just translating the content is far from enough to win customers and build global brands. Whatever industry you are in - software, healthcare, automobiles - razor-sharp marketing to the end-user through direct channels and direct engagement, with personalized content is the way to go. How we converge old-style localization with the latest digital marketing techniques is the new frontier explored by the most innovative companies.

If you thought that MT had reached a plateau where almost no further improvements could be expected, you were wrong. A new breakthrough has announced itself and it is called Neural (or Deep Learning) MT. Where the current generation of Statistical MT engines usually stop learning from phrases or N-grams of no more than three words, the new Neural MT engines take in much longer phrases and learn from context. The result: dramatic improvements in the quality of MT output. You can’t ignore this. Fully automatic translation (without the effort of post-editing) may become useful for more content and in more scenarios that could not be supported until now.

Robots that speak your language are no longer science fiction, as we all know. But teaching them to take on an attitude as our human companions often do, caused some hilarious moments at the TAUS Industry Leaders Forum in Dublin. Speech-to-speech translation has been on the agenda of TAUS events for years now and its rapid progress cannot be denied. Most outspoken of course with the Skype Translator. What’s needed to push on is data, again: speech data in many more domains and languages. The attendees in the TAUS Industry Leaders Forum in Dublin called on TAUS to expand the Data Cloud and open it up for speech corpora as well.

References

In September 2016 TAUS will publish a report on the Speech-to-Speech Translation Sector

Translation has entered the public domain. Buttons pop up on every screen and in every app to give us access to content in our own language. The translation industry is bursting with new technologies, platforms and solutions. But as it happens, most of the innovation is made elsewhere, not in our own organizations. In fact, the most disruptive innovation, usually comes from outside an industry. Think about how Google Translate shook up the translation sector. We can’t afford to ignore or deny it. We have to watch the innovation (made elsewhere): in China, in Japan, in digital marketing, and make use of it where we can.

Agenda

Monday 24 October

Outside of machine translation applications (prevalent in cross-border e-commerce and travel), the most significant use case for language services over the Internet has been the localization of the World Wide Web and of countless mobile apps, giving Internet users informational access to online tools and services across the globe. However, the crossroad of translation and the Internet should not be limited to just localization or machine translations. How will the Internet or ideas of the Internet/Mobile Era help transform translation for the modern age? Here's an insider's look at Alibaba Language Services, where we are rethinking the production process as well as the business model for breaking the language barrier.

As we anticipate or debate an approaching singularity for translation, technology advances may change not only how human translators work but also how they must be trained. In light of such disruptive advances, this panel will address the following questions: Will existing human translators have a place in a new translation economy or will they require entirely new skill sets for new roles? How should educational institutions prepare the translators of the future? And what on-the-job training can managers provide to meet short-term needs?

For many firms, global crowdsourcing is an unparalleled way to reduce fixed costs and dramatically enhance operating efficiency and scalability. Enterprise crowdsourcing and big data seem to be a good match, particularly as data-related work can often be broken down into tasks or projects. Managing resources and workflows at the task or unit level is at the heart of the localization industry’s expertise. Many suppliers are finding that they can easily offer adjacent services such as search relevance, sentiment analysis, data tagging, user generated content curation, transcription, and data enrichment, in a crowd model – typically in a private crowd. This panel will discuss whether localization service providers and language technology innovators are offering relevant crowd solutions. Using technology as a lens, we will also discuss whether there is a role for increased crowdsourcing as the adoption of MT drives increased post-editing work. Lastly we will exchange ideas about where the crowdsourcing opportunity sits in the framework of the “gig” economy, and whether it will thrive and grow, or crumble under the push for legislation and labor reform.

To Share or Not to Share, hosted by Eric Bailey (Microsoft) with panelists: Diego Lagunas (PayPal), more TBC. Read more.

In the general scheme of things, the localization industry is relatively small, the challenges associated with the process of localization are well understood and consistent regardless of which companies are involved. While there are a couple of possible exceptions most of us would agree that the tools and infrastructure that we invest in are not, in the long term, a strategic differentiating factor for our core businesses. However, there can be considerable opportunity cost associated with developing unique solutions for our individual businesses. There is considerable advantage to be won when we can collaborate in an open source model to reduce this opportunity cost. We are interested in promoting an investigation of and prioritization of potential projects. It would be great to identify some concrete examples of tools that we could collaborate on. This session aims to explore the appetite for such work across the industry, the identification of possible projects and key contributors. At the very least we could create a forum for leading engineers across to community to recognize opportunity for collaboration and convergence.

Welcome to the future of globalized business. Humans and our intelligent robot friends have achieved the perfect symbiotic working relationship, thanks in large part to an enlightened clarity of what we want the robots to do and a clear understanding of what the robots need to learn in order for them to perform the tasks for which they are best suited. This roundtable session - led by Moravia's Erik Vogt - is a continuation of the ideas introduced during Dublin's ‘Machine Learning’ session led by Adam LaMontagne. Erik invites special guests to explore the open questions of what the smart robots should be doing, what they need to know in order to do it well, and what data we need to use to train them. The datafication of translation began a few years ago and is now in full swing. Our mission as an industry is to now bridge the gaps between data, machine intelligence, and process optimization. The future needs your input!

This discussion follows on from the ‘Future does not need translators’ session and zooms in on talent shortage in the translation industry and the university-industry relationship. For several years, the machine translation and localization fields have been beset by a “talent shortage.” Conference presentations bemoan it, CEOs and CHROs struggle with it, and yet the theme persists, while the situation apparently worsens. Where is the next generation of machine translation professionals and visionaries coming from? Are they primarily supplied by higher education? If so, can we rely solely on a limited number of quality graduate programs alone to fuel our future, or are undergraduate learners set to make a mark in the MT industry following graduation? As noted academics move from university to industry, do we increasingly challenge higher education’s ability to meet this talent need? Will we look in the future to research collaboratives, short courses, certificates, bootcamps, or MOOCs? Or perhaps we will look even farther afield. As translation becomes more of a commodity, will we be looking outside the world of formal education in language and culture, borrowing (or raiding) AI and machine learning talent from other disciplines and educational pipelines? Will our future talent be drawn from business, data science, entrepreneurship, and deep learning specialists who are then trained in MT? This panel will present and discuss these questions from a variety of perspectives, from both within higher education and outside of it.

15:00

Refreshment Break

Plenary Sessions

15:30

Brief reports back from the discussions in the parallel track sessions by the session leaders.

If you thought that MT had reached a plateau where almost no further improvements could be expected, you were wrong. A new breakthrough has announced itself and it is called Neural (or Deep Learning) MT. Where the current generation of Statistical MT engines usually stop learning from phrases or N-grams of no more than three words, the new Neural MT engines take in much longer phrases and learn from context. The result: dramatic improvements in the quality of MT output. You can’t ignore this. Fully automatic translation (without the effort of post-editing) may become useful for more content and in more scenarios that could not be supported until now.

TAUS has invited insider and invader innovators, small and large companies, start-ups and established players, participate in a contest for the best innovator. On this first day of the TAUS Annual Conference, the invaders compete.

16:25

Champolu, by Hussein GhalyAs a language learning company, we obtain multilingual material using different systems, including a crawler for multilingual websites, document alignment system, online multilingual spreadsheets, multilingual lyrics for songs, online audio recorder and more. In our presentation, we show how we do this.

QR Translator, Kenji Takaoka (PIJIN)Simple solution to make a sign speak any language by just scanning a qr code on it. More than 3,000 well-known places all over Japan. Also useful for visually-impaired persons.

16:43

Lilt, by Spence GreenLilt makes translation faster for translators, LSPs, and businesses. It is an integrated translation platform built around interactive, adaptive machine translation.

16:49

VMWare, by Raymond PengA solution to detect potential layout problems early in the software UI design phase to eliminate the problem during software localization.

16:55

TBD, Henry Wang (UTH International)Henry will make a demo of Sesame Translate, an innovative and smart translation tool developed by UTH International. He will also describe how Sesame Translate differentiates itself from all other CAT and MT tools in the market.

17:01

Bicrawler, Gema Ramirez (Prompsit)Data, monolingual and bilingual, are essential to our industry. So, what do you do when you need more? Come and discover Bicrawler, a modern web-based tool to get high-quality parallel corpora from the Internet.

Margaret Ann Dowling will talk about the traps with regards to content creation and translation. She’ll share tips on how to improve your content, how to reach the right customers and how to improve the relationship with your customers. She’ll also touch upon the integration of user-generated content and machine created content and how to define your tone of voice.

So you have your localization tools and data in a private, public or hybrid Cloud. Great! But how “Cloud” are you, really? Do you have your people working at the speed of Cloud? If you don’t, does it matter if you have all the Cloud infrastructure/systems in place? And which is more important, speed of Cloud or ease of Cloud? Our panel of expert leaders has seen the full-spectrum journey to the Cloud and will share their thoughts on what it takes to really leverage this oh-so-popular model…and why.

With the launch of version 3.0, TAUS DQF has reached adulthood. After years of development and testing, a new dashboard, a new API and plug-ins for a number of technologies, we won’t retire yet. It’s high-time to scale up development capacity and gather an enthusiastic camp of early adopters to bring DQF to the next level. Starting from June 2016, a group of Enterprise Users have started discussing quality related topics in formal biweekly calls. The objective of the DQF Enterprise User Group (EUG) is to harmonize translation quality evaluation (QE). QE is a non-competing function in the translation industry. If we harmonize and standardize QE, we will save time, increase clarity, make reporting easier and allow for comparison and benchmarking. On the medium and longer term, the harmonization of QE will lead to business intelligence that facilitates optimization of translation and localization processes. In this session, we will report on a number of resolutions passed in the last few calls and share further plans as we go forward.

The close to 7 billion people on our planet speak more than 7,000 languages. According to Ethnologue we reach 40% of the world’s population if we speak 8 languages. Add 84 more languages and you double that to around 80% of the world’s population. Microsoft and Google (and other companies like them with a strong global internet presence) are currently in that range. If they want to reach 1 billion more users in their own language they count 300 more languages. Now, that would be a huge undertaking. It is not just four times the language spread and workload, but we have to take into account that resources - like translators, tools and data - are much less in supply for all those new languages. The question is also how many of the 7,000 languages really matter to our business. In our digital age most languages are losing their prestige because of their lack of a digital presence. Some argue that there may only be 250 digital surviving languages. This panel will discuss the challenges and opportunities - from a business and altruistic perspective - on the language frontiers.

Effective MT customization is not so straightforward. While it has been shown that pooling data even with competitors in the same industry domain has a positive effect on MT quality, combining data from different sources and selecting the right set of data to build well performing MT systems is often still done more like alchemy rather than science. For many language combinations and domains little or no data is available. Even if nominally sufficient data is available, adding data that is not appropriate or not of high enough quality leads to diminishing returns. In the ModernMT EU project we faced the same challenges and built a large data repository combining data from the industry leading translation data sharing platforms TAUS Data Cloud and Translated’s MyMemory, public data and data sourced from the open web repository Common Crawl. ModernMT uses context-aware data selection to choose data from this repository, combining it with data optionally submitted by the user to create domain-adapted MT systems on-the-fly. In this session we present lessons we learned from using data from TAUS, MyMemory, Oracle, PayPal and LinkedIn for Context and Adaptive MT.

The TAUS DQF can provide both structural inspiration for quality initiatives and a hands-on tool for translation quality assessment. In this session, we learn from Catherine Dove of Z-Axis and Mark Davidson of Red Hat how they have interacted with the DQF and leveraged insights gleaned from the DQF. We will also discuss what they anticipate for the future. The session is moderated by Richard Sikes, who has used the web-based DQF user interface for translation quality reviews.

It has become apparent over the past few years that our industry is no longer defined by the volumes of words we translate, and that the good old price-per-word for translation and annual licensing for technology should be giving way to new alternate models. What engagement scenarios will allow the sellers to remain profitable and grow, and help buyers focus on business outcomes rather than day-to-day operations? Let us continue the conversation that we started in Dublin about what needs to change in the way we think about our business, and what technology and processes need to be put in place in order to open the door to next generation operating and economic models.

15:00

Refreshment Break

Plenary Sessions

15:30

Brief reports back from the discussions in the parallel track sessions by the session leaders.

TAUS has invited insider and invader innovators, small and large companies, start-ups and established players, participate in a contest for the best innovator. On this second day of the TAUS Annual Conference, the insiders compete.

ActivaTM brings much needed innovation to the CAT-TM-MT space. By splitting TM from CAT interfaces, ActivaTM can provide simultaneous access across CAT tools with extremely high scalability, whilst retrieving subsegment matches and language pivoting that can be used as MT training material. Manuel Herranz (Pangeanic)

Because eLearning videos are long by nature, it's very expensive to use the traditional method of voice-over which require time-consuming work of audio/video editing. VideoLocalize is a localization platform that uses a Karaoke style voice-over method to eliminate the need for that costly audio/video editing. George Zhao (Boffin Language)

Augmented Translator .HT vs MT: we will present how new neural technology can totally change the relation between humans and translation tools – and lead to a new generation of super-human translators. Jean Senellart, JP Barraza (Systran)

16:21

Vistatec has harnessed and integrated several mature natural language processing applications,linguistic resources and Internet scale knowledge graphs to automatically and discreetly enrich content.This reduces physical and cognitive effort for authors and linguists; and delivers added value tocustomers in the form of content that is more discoverable, interactive, sticky, and intelligent. Phil Ritchie (Vistatec)

16:27

Why pay for the ugly part of MT? With the new innovative pricing model, Globalese users are paying only for qualified MT words, meaning words which are really helping translators. Gábor Bessenyei (Morphologic)

16:33

SmartCAT.ai: Artificial Intelligence to change work styles in localization. At SmartCAT, we believe that now is the time for a serious reflection on how technology can and should change the work styles of people engaged in localization. Our presentation is focused on leveraging advanced AI algorithms for real-time communication, cloud-based team management, and using smart chatbots, which monitor projects in real-time and recommend corrective actions based on current status, thus streamlining the work of project managers. Ivan Smolnikov (SmartCAT)

16:39

There has been increased interest in Cross-Language Search (or Cross-Language Information Retrieval, CLIR) at Intel. Ryan will discuss the use of MT to translate search terms in the global Intel Support Community as a means of connecting users with relevant content. Ryan Martin (Intel)

Any Questions (20)

16:45

Topical discussionin which a panel of personalities from the different stakeholder groups in the translation industry are posed questions by the audience under chairmanship of Paul Mangell (AlphaCRC). The panelists are: James Douglas (Microsoft), Darin Goble (Welocalize), Spence Green (Lilt), Tony O’Dowd (KantanMT), Adam Wooten (MIIS), Christine Duran (Workday)

Innovation Contest

The global translation industry is on the verge of expansion into new applications and new domains. We are entering the Convergence era: translation is becoming a utility embedded on every screen, in every device, in every app. The translation industry plays a crucial and strategic role in the ever more globalizing world of business and governance. To optimize the growth opportunities we need to work together as translation operators on the buy and supply side. The TAUS Annual Conference is a marketplace of ideas for innovation, automation and collaboration. In dynamic and interactive sessions delegates will share and pitch ideas. The common goal is to lay the ground for faster growth.

Game Changer Innovation Awards

The translation industry is bursting with new offerings, technologies, platforms and solutions. Like in previous years TAUS invites both insider and invader innovators, small and large companies, start-ups and established players, to come to the Annual Conference and participate in a contest for the best innovator. In a pecha-kucha style the contenders will present their product. The audience will select winners of the "TAUS Game-Changer Innovation Awards" in two categories: an Insider Innovation Award and an Invader Innovation Award. In addition, a special session will be set up following the conference, to allow for a full pitch session via webinar to select members of the TAUS Advisory Board, representing firms such as Dell, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and leading Language Service Providers. This session, while not implying a commitment to evaluate or purchase, will provide valuable insights and feedback for the entrepreneur.

“The Rules of the Game”

All innovators interested in taking part in the contest are requested to submit their proposal. The call for proposals closed on 22 August at midnight.

All proposals will be reviewed by the Program Committee. By August 31, a maximum of twenty companies (ten in each category) will be invited to come to Portland and present their innovation.

The presentations will be in Pecha-Kucha style. Each presenter has 6 minutes. Unlike the official Pecha Kucha style we are not very strict with the number of slides and the number of seconds you spend on each slide. However, there will be a timer on the big screen that counts down from 6 minutes until your time is up.

After all the presentations, the Annual Conference attendees receive a link to vote for the best innovator in each category.

One insider and invader will receive the TAUS Innovation Excellence Award, a unique piece of TAUS artwork. They will also get special exposure on the TAUS website and social media through press releases and blog posts.

Program Committee

Program Committee

The program for the TAUS Annual Conference is created and reviewed by a Program Committee of experts and leaders in the field:

Olga Beregovaya | Welocalize

Olga Beregovaya is VP, Technology Solutions at Welocalize. Prior to that, Olga was president of PROMT Americas, responsible for MT strategy and development. Olga has over 15 years of leadership experience in localization, expert knowledge of enterprise globalization and Machine Translation systems development. She holds a M.A. (Hons) in Linguistics from St. Petersburg University and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. She has a unique combination of client and vendor-side experience.

Eric Boulanger | Translation Bureau of the Canadian Government

James Douglas | Microsoft

James Douglas. graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1985 and moved to the Netherlands where he worked for Philips Consumer Electronics. He worked on developing video signal processing for Laser Visions machines. After three years working in the development labs in Eindhoven he moved to the Philips Nederland BV, national sales organization, where he held a variety of roles ranging from product and account management to sales lead and finally marketing manager. All of these roles were within the organization responsible for technical support for the Professional lines of business. This covered security systems targeting large installations with customers such as Shell, Ministry of Defense, NATO, a number of prisons. In 1995, he left Philips and joined Microsoft in Dublin. Here he started as a group manager for the localization of Access. Since then his leadership has grown with the Office portfolio of products and he is now responsible for the delivery of all of the international releases of the Office business. This responsibility includes the supply chain, the engineering investment in necessary workflows, tools and infrastructure, resource management and optimization for the different distribution channels and stores across all platforms supported. The team he leads is predominately in Seattle and Dublin but has representatives in many of our major markets. Over the course of his time with Microsoft he has also been responsible for building up a V-1 engineering team in Dublin and successfully delivering a V-1 subscription service for the Office consumer offerings.

Loïc Dufresne de Virel | Intel

Loïc Dufresne de Virel, a twenty year industry veteran, is currently the localization strategist with Intel’s in-house localization team. On top of managing advanced localization projects involving language models and multilingual speech recognition engines, Loïc also has direct ownership for functional areas such as Innovation and Business Operations. In particular, he is the sponsor of a recent initiative to deploy a localization-focused enterprise service bus, making it easy and efficient for customers across the corporation to access localization capabilities provided by his team, today and in the future.

Spence Green | LILT

Spence Green is CEO of Lilt, a provider of interactive MT systems. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014 under the direction of Chris Manning and Jeff Heer.

Tanya Helmen | NVTC

Paul Mangell | Alpha CRC

Paul Mangell is an experienced Localization Professional having been part of the Language Industry since 1982. He has lived and worked in a number of countries, and speaks several languages fluently. He currently works in the area of marketing, sales and communications with Alpha CRC, a global LSP.

Sergio Pelino | PayPal

Jessica Roland | SDL

Jessica Roland serves as Director of Strategic Accounts at SDL. She has 15+ years of globalization experience, both in the enterprise software world with Documentum/EMC and with top web companies like Yahoo! and Glassdoor, leading global teams in international product development and evangelizing global innovation internally and with customers.

Paula Shannon | Lionbridge

Paula (Barbary) Shannon manages Lionbridge’s $600M+ global sales forces and account management teams. Her international career was featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Paula joined Lionbridge in 1999 as Vice President of Internet Alliances and assumed additional responsibilities in 2001 and 2008. Prior to joining Lionbridge, Paula was the Chief Marketing and Sales Officer for Alpnet, Inc., now SDL. She has more than 30 years of experience in the language and translation industry, including 10 years in senior roles with Berlitz International. Paula Shannon is fluent in English, French, and Dutch, and functional in German, Spanish, and Russian. Educated in Canada, Belgium and the US, she holds a B.A. in Russian and German with a minor in Linguistics from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Paula was recently named By the Canadian Board Diversity Council to the 2016 ‘Diversity 50’, a listing of 50 diverse men and women from across Canada with strong competencies that align with the requirements of many Canadian boards.

Andrea Siciliano | Google

Francis Tsang | LinkedIn

Francis Tsang leads the international engineering effort at LinkedIn to enable economic opportunity for every member in the global workforce. His personal mission is to help remove language and cultural barriers in the world through technologies. Francis currently serves on the advisory boards of TAUS, the ADAPT Centre, The Rosetta Foundation and Translators without Borders.

Speakers

Eric Bailey | Microsoft

Eric has been with Microsoft since 1998 and has worked on products such as Word, the Office Web Applications and the core Office Engineering teams. He is currently the Group Engineering Manager for the Global Service and Experiences team within Office which is responsible for the world-readiness, globalization and localization of Microsoft Office and several other Microsoft products.

JP Barraza | Systran

Olga Beregovaya | Welocalize

Olga Beregovaya is VP, Technology Solutions at Welocalize. Prior to that, Olga was president of PROMT Americas, responsible for MT strategy and development. Olga has over 15 years of leadership experience in localization, expert knowledge of enterprise globalization and Machine Translation systems development. She holds a M.A. (Hons) in Linguistics from St. Petersburg University and an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. She has a unique combination of client and vendor-side experience.

Gábor Bessenyei | Morphologic

Gábor Bessenyei is the CEO of MorphoLogic Localisation. He started his career in 1994 at Dynasoft, the Hungarian reselling partner of SAP, as a translator of the SAP R/3 release 2.2. In 1997, he went to the newly established subsidiary of SAP Hungary where as a translation coordinator, IT manager and member of the board he was responsible for the Hungarian language versions of SAP products and internal IT. In 2001 he founded MorphoLogic Localisation, a software localization and language technology company.

Melissa Biggs | Informatica

Melissa Biggs manages the globalization marketing team at Informatica, a software leader in data integration technology. Her focus centers on high value content localization strategies, solutions, tools and processes for marketing assets, marketing automation content management, and web localization. Melissa has over 20 years’ experience leading localization and globalization business strategies and teams at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Informatica. Her experience spans software, hardware , documentation, training, marketing contents. She has a BA from Bucknell University, postgraduate focus in Communications, and has participated in a wide range of localization industry initiatives.

Wayne Bourland | Dell

Wayne Bourland is recognized as an agent for change, driving innovation and process efficiencies across global organizations. After a decade-long career in the US Army, he joined Dell, starting as a rep in the call center and quickly moving to managing call centers, launching call centers globally, and then into content management and localization. He is currently responsible for translation of Dell.com and marketing collateral for more than 100 organizations across Dell. With no background in linguistics, he approaches the industry with a different perspective, focusing on end value and customer acceptance. Known for his straight talk and no-nonsense approach, Wayne has been published numerous times in publications such as Multilingual Magazine, Brand Quarterly, webinars and blogs. In addition, Wayne previously served on TDA’s board and currently serves on the advisory board of TAUS.

Henri Broekmate | Lionbridge

Henri Broekmate is General Manager of Lionbridge Technologies’ Asia business with responsibility for 850 Lions in 9 sites in 7 countries. Henri joined Lionbridge in April 2001 after serving as COO and SVP, e-Business at TRADOS for almost 5 years. Henri has worked in the localization services and language technology business for almost 30 years, starting his career at INK Nederland in Amsterdam as a translator and desktop publisher. He holds a BA and MA (Cum Laude) from the Free University of Amsterdam and an MBA (With Distinction) from the Bradford University School of Management. He has lived, studied and worked in The Netherlands, The United Kingdom, The Republic of Ireland and the United States of America. Henri currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Four Winds, Westward Ho, a non-profit summer camp that was founded in Deer Harbor on Orcas Island, WA, in 1927.

Jim Compton | Moravia

Jim Compton is a Program Manager in the Language Technology Group at Moravia and 20+ year veteran of the localization/globalization-enablement industry. His current focus includes addressing what he believes is a growing gap between global content management/marketing practices and traditional translation management approaches — an area he asserts is ripe for reform and rich with opportunity. His formal education is in journalism, and his hobbies include playing Minecraft and writing/performing 8-bit rock music. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

Nathalie Dougall | Booking.com

Nathalie has been with Booking.com since 2010 and manages freelance operations in their Translations & Content Agency. Having joined the Freelance team since its inception in order to set up and organise operations, she has facilitated its growth from ‘working at home’ internal translators to a global network of freelancers working 24/7 in over 40 languages. With a view to scaling and operationalising further content products, photography and UGC are also part of her focus.

James Douglas | Microsoft

James Douglas. graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1985 and moved to the Netherlands where he worked for Philips Consumer Electronics. He worked on developing video signal processing for Laser Visions machines. After three years working in the development labs in Eindhoven he moved to the Philips Nederland BV, national sales organization, where he held a variety of roles ranging from product and account management to sales lead and finally marketing manager. All of these roles were within the organization responsible for technical support for the Professional lines of business. This covered security systems targeting large installations with customers such as Shell, Ministry of Defense, NATO, a number of prisons. In 1995, he left Philips and joined Microsoft in Dublin. Here he started as a group manager for the localization of Access. Since then his leadership has grown with the Office portfolio of products and he is now responsible for the delivery of all of the international releases of the Office business. This responsibility includes the supply chain, the engineering investment in necessary workflows, tools and infrastructure, resource management and optimization for the different distribution channels and stores across all platforms supported. The team he leads is predominately in Seattle and Dublin but has representatives in many of our major markets. Over the course of his time with Microsoft he has also been responsible for building up a V-1 engineering team in Dublin and successfully delivering a V-1 subscription service for the Office consumer offerings.

Catherine Dove | Z-Axis Tech Solutions

Catherine Dove is the Sr Director of Localization at Z-Axis Tech Solutions, a global provider of consulting, localization, and IT services. She is responsible for designing and implementing globalization quality strategies for strategic clients looking for the best possible results in alignment with their in-country stakeholders, and with optimal process and cost efficiency. Prior to joining the vendor side, Catherine managed worldwide quality and operational excellence teams on the client side for over 10 years, at PayPal and i2 Technologies. She is a frequent speaker at Localization and Machine Translation conferences.

Margaret Ann Dowling | Burda

Christine Duran | Workday

Gabriel Fairman | Bureau Translations

Gabriel knew from an early age he had a calling towards building and managing organizations. He began Bureau Translations in 2005 trying to put everything together: his love autonomy, languages, technology and a high-intensity work environment. Father of two and a dedicated but terrible tennis player, he spends most of his time about how to improve his special sauce that keeps Bureau Translations a vibrant and exciting place to be.

Hussein Ghaly | Champolu

Hussein Ghaly has been a translator and a computational linguist at the United Nations for 7+ years. He has a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from the American University in Cairo, and has completed his MA in Computational Linguistics at City University of New York (CUNY), with a thesis project in sentence alignment in parallel corpora. He is currently a PhD Candidate also in linguistics at CUNY. Hussein has a passion for building language technology/NLP systems, and he has developed many of them for these areas: mining multilingual content, Machine Translation, Computer Aided Translation, terminology management, machine learning and content classification, sentence and word alignment, audio processing, parsing, indexing and retrieval systems and more. Many of these systems were combined in the development of the new language learning approach, Champolu, which uses multilingual material in the context of mobile game apps, songs and other fun activities to achieve enjoyable and effective language learning experience. Hussein speaks a few languages himself (native speaker of Arabic: Standard and Egyptian, fluent at English, German, French and currently starting Spanish).

Darin Goble | Welocalize

Chris Grebisz | Welocalize

Spence Green | LILT

Spence Green is CEO of Lilt, a provider of interactive MT systems. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014 under the direction of Chris Manning and Jeff Heer.

Mimi Hills | VMWare

Mimi Hills is Director, Product Globalization at VMware, Inc. and has held the director role for globalization teams at BlackBerry and Sun Microsystems. She's led teams from 18 to 180 people in localization and internationalization and likes to leave her door open for collaboration. She has a special interest in tools and technology--and finding the right size solution for the problem to be solved. She comes from the software world with a background in project and engineering management. She's active in the localization industry and is a passionate advocate for the non-English speaking user. In her spare time she us a mentor for the TechWomen program, and when there's time, plays guitar and stand-up bass.

Katell Jentreau | Netflix

Maxim Khalilov | Booking.com

Diego Lagunas | PayPal

Adam Li | Facebook

Yu (Eric) Liu | Alibaba Language Services

Eric Liu is the GM of Alibaba Language Services. Eric joined Alibaba Group when a crowdsourcing company he founded was acquired by Alibaba in 2015. Eric Liu is a graduate of Vassar College in New York

Paul Mangell | Alpha CRC

Paul Mangell is an experienced Localization Professional having been part of the Language Industry since 1982. He has lived and worked in a number of countries, and speaks several languages fluently. He currently works in the area of marketing, sales and communications with Alpha CRC, a global LSP.

Daniel Marcu | Fairtrade Translation

Daniel Marcu is a Founder at FairTradeTranslation.com. He enjoys creating and growing commercial organizations; developing advanced R&D concepts; and transitioning them into novel commercial software and services. In the past, he has co-founded and built Language Weaver Inc. and has created and contributed to software that is used by more than 100 million people worldwide (ETS Criterion, Language Weaver MT, and SDL Language Cloud). He is a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics for significant contributions to discourse parsing, summarization and machine translation and for kick starting the statistical machine translation industry.

Ryan C. Martin | Intel

Ryan Martin is a natural language processing (NLP) expert and application developer at Intel. Over the last decade he has led the integration of MT into Intel translation processes and piloted new enterprise use cases for MT. As part of Intel’s MT Framework initiative, he has also led the deployment of automated translation solutions on multiple platforms including the Intel Customer Support web site, Download Center, and Intel Communities (forums).

Alan Melby | Brigham Young University

Julien Mira | Cisco Systems

Azam Mirza | Akorbi

As President of Akorbi, Azam Mirza oversees world-wide business initiatives, business development, innovation and strategic growth efforts. Under his leadership, the company became the fastest-growing language services provider in the world. Azam’s responsibilities also include strategy development and daily business operations; technology and R&D; finance and accounting; marketing and branding; and sales. Azam’s leadership and vision have turned Akorbi into a multi-million dollar global business solutions company with more than 600 full-time and part-time employees worldwide.

Claudia Mirza | Akorbi

Claudia Mirza is the CEO/co-founder of Akorbi. Under Claudia’s leadership, Akorbi has experienced 758% growth in recent years. Akorbi is one of the most diverse language companies with services that include multilingual staffing, multilingual call centers, interpretation, video remote technologies and eLearning. In 2016, Akorbi landed the #501 spot in the Inc. 5000. The Women Presidents’ Organization and American Express also ranked Akorbi as the 12th fastest growing woman-owned/led company and invited Claudia to sit on their prestigious Board. Akorbi was the Fastest Growing LSP in 2014, according to Common Sense Advisory. Claudia is currently attending a three-year global Owner/President Management program at Harvard Business School.

Mackenzie Nicholson | Google

Tony O'Dowd | KantanMT

Tony O’Dowd is the Founder and Chief Architect of KantanMT.com, a cloud based Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) solutions provider. He has over 25 years’ experience working in the localization industry, and has previously held positions at Lotus Development Corporation, Symantec Corporation, Corel Corporation Ltd., and Alchemy Software Development, which he founded in 2000. Tony holds a BSc. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin, and a Fellowship from the Localization Research Institute at the University of Limerick. He is currently a member of the governance board of the CNGL Centre for Global Intelligent Content at Dublin City University.

Sergey Parievsky | VMWare

Sergey Parievsky has been involved in globalization since 1989, after joining Autodesk in Moscow, Russia. Since then, he has worked for a number of companies in Silicon Valley, in California, USA, both on the vendor and client sides. Sergey has held globalization leadership positions at Zynga, Cisco Systems, BMC, Siebel and SimulTrans. Currently, he manages product globalization technology and operations programs at VMware. Sergey’s skills and interests in localization include innovations in localization technology, process and operations management, as well as international product and vendor management.

Sergio Pelino | PayPal

Sergio is a veteran of the localization industry with 25 years of experience spent on enterprise size buyer's side managing language quality assurance process and technology, translation tools and workflow, localization technology PMs and linguists. Before Paypal, Sergio was at Google and held multiple roles in Microsoft and Oracle’s localization teams focusing on enterprise scale translation technology, innovation and global process.

Raymond Peng | VMWare

Raymond Peng has been working in the software internationalization and localization area for many years at both vendor and client side. After joining VMware, his focus is not only on VMware product internationalization and localization, but also on developing tools to improve the product localization process. He is interested in and seeking to revolutionize the software globalization industry with disruptive technologies and innovations. Raymond has submitted several patent papers and is currently hosting the blogs on software internationalization and localization. He has also authored a business-focused book and video on how to improve the technical presentations.

Mirko Plitt | Translators Without Borders

Gema Ramirez | Prompsit Language Engineering

Gema made sure that she could mix her two passions: languages and computers. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Translation and Interpreting and a Master's degree in Computer Applications from the University of Alicante where she started her professional career as a computational linguist. She is the CEO of Prompsit, a language technology provider with a strong focus on tailored MT services and multilingual applications of natural language technologies. She's currently the product manager of AltLang, the language variety converter that will help you to take better care of local audiences. You will find her frequently running workshops or linguistic olympiads everywhere, thanks to the European project Abu-MaTran. She is co-author of various research papers, an active developer the Apertium MT platform and the vice president of ARTES Cultura y Ocio, an association for inclusive leisure for disabled and non-disabled people.

David Rhodes | Akorbi

As VP of Video Mobility, David W. Rhodes oversees the development, deployment, maintenance and operations of Akorbi’s video mobility solution called Unified Mobility Communications Platform. It allows users to access interpreters and translators through video conferencing delivered on any mobile device. David’s extensive 19 year career includes roles as CEO of VRI Direct (a provider of video remote interpretation technology), Director of Operations for LifeLinks Video Interpretation Services and Owner of D.W. Rhodes Interpreting Services. He comes to Akorbi with a wealth of experience in operations management, business development, B2B sales, contract negotiations and enterprise-wide software implementation, as well as diverse business functions. David has Bachelor of Science degrees in Process Management and Marketing, as well as a Master’s in Business Administration from Arizona State University. He also has certifications in Interpretation and Transliteration from the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf.

Steve Richardson | LDS Church

Steve Richardson is the manager of Translation Systems in the LDS Church’s Publishing Services Department, where he has worked for the last four years overseeing the Church’s use of translation management systems, translator workbenches, and machine translation systems for over 90 languages and 1000 translators. Previously, he completed a 3-year mission assignment in Brazil with his wife and younger children, and 17 years at Microsoft Research as a Principal Researcher and manager of the Machine Translation Group, which created the Microsoft Translator. Prior to his time at Microsoft, he spent 11 years at IBM working in natural language processing, including at the TJ Watson Research Center. He holds Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Linguistics from Brigham Young University and a PhD in Computer Science from the City University of New York. During his career, Dr. Richardson has served on numerous advisory boards and conference program committees in organizations such as the Translation Automation User Society (TAUS) and the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA). He is the author and/or editor of various books, conference proceedings, research papers, and numerous patents in NLP and MT.

Phil Ritchie | Vistatec

Phil Ritchie is Chief Technology Officer at Vistatec where he directs and drives all language technology and research and development activities. Phil has been in the industry long enough to see many ideas and technologies come around for the second time. Phil is the Chairman of the ADAPT Industry Advisory Board; a participant in a European Commission funded Horizon 2020 research projects; a member of several technical committees; Chair of the W3C ITS 2.0 Interest Group; co‑Chair of the W3C RAX community; and lead architect of the Ocelot open source editor project. Phil relaxes by writing code, binge‑watching machine learning videos and sailing. He can be coaxed into giving talks and webinars on the promise of fame, fortune and hoppy beer.

Liliana Rojas | Google

Liliana Rojas was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. She studied Industrial Engineering at Universidad de Los Andes and came to the US with HP. She worked for 12 years in Consumer and Enterprise marketing in companies like Unilever, Hewlett Packard, Intel and Symantec. Liliana worked for Apple in several Operations positioning managing Localization both at Retail and Sales Training among other responsibilities. She currently works for Google as the Localization Head of Global Operations. Liliana has an MBA degree and speaks Spanish and French. She lives in Sunnyvale, California, with her husband and two children.

Jessica Roland | SDL

Jessica Roland serves as Director of Strategic Accounts at SDL. She has 15+ years of globalization experience, both in the enterprise software world with Documentum/EMC and with top web companies like Yahoo! and Glassdoor, leading global teams in international product development and evangelizing global innovation internally and with customers.

Matt Romaine | Gengo

Matthew Romaine is co-founder and chief executive officer of Gengo, a global people-powered translation platform enabling everyone to read and publish across languages. A serial entrepreneur, Romaine enjoys developing disruptive services, which help people connect and communicate easily around the world. Prior to Gengo, Romaine was part of Sony’s R&D group, where he researched the future of audio and served as a key member in the Corporate Technology Department, developing growth strategies. After Sony, Romaine founded Majides, a web-development company helping plan, build and deploy web-services for an international audience.

Carla Schelfhout | SDL

Carla Schelfhout obtained a PhD in computational linguistics before joining SDL. Building on her MT knowledge as well as practical experience as IT translator, she contributed to the implementation of PEMT (Post-editing Machine Translation) at SDL. During the last eight years, PEMT within SDL has grown from 3% of content to 27% of content while maintaining the quality standards agreed with customers. This is due to a large degree to designing and implementing a testing process that identifies the suitable candidates for a PEMT approach.

Mark Seligman | Spoken Translation

Dr. Mark Seligman is founder, President, and CEO of Spoken Translation, Inc. His early research concerned automatic generation of multi-paragraph discourses, inheritance-based grammars, and automatic grammar induction. During the 1980’s, he was the founding software trainer at IntelliCorp, Inc., a forefront developer of artificial intelligence programming tools. His research associations include ATR Institute International near Kyoto, where he studied numerous aspects of speech-to-speech translation; GETA (the Groupe d’Étude pour la Traduction Automatique) at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France; and DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz) in Saarbrücken, Germany. In the late 1990s’, he was Publications Manager at Inxight Software, Inc., commercializing linguistic and visualization programs developed at PARC. In 1997 and 1998, in cooperation with CompuServe, Inc., he organized the first speech translation system demonstrating broad coverage with acceptable quality. He established Spoken Translation, Inc. in 2002.

Jean Senellart | SYSTRAN

Jean Senellart is the Chief Scientist of SYSTRAN and has been driving development of SYSTRAN hybrid technology and new generation of SYSTRAN products. Jean graduated from the Paris Ecole Polytechnique and holds a PhD in Computational Linguistics from the University of Paris VII – LADL. He began his career as a researcher and has been teaching Natural Language Processing at Ecole Polytechnique. With a double passion for natural and computing languages, he is a strong believer in the value of big data combined with language analysis.

Paula Shannon | Lionbridge

Paula (Barbary) Shannon manages Lionbridge’s $600M+ global sales forces and account management teams. Her international career was featured in the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Paula joined Lionbridge in 1999 as Vice President of Internet Alliances and assumed additional responsibilities in 2001 and 2008. Prior to joining Lionbridge, Paula was the Chief Marketing and Sales Officer for Alpnet, Inc., now SDL. She has more than 30 years of experience in the language and translation industry, including 10 years in senior roles with Berlitz International. Paula Shannon is fluent in English, French, and Dutch, and functional in German, Spanish, and Russian. Educated in Canada, Belgium and the US, she holds a B.A. in Russian and German with a minor in Linguistics from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Paula was recently named By the Canadian Board Diversity Council to the 2016 ‘Diversity 50’, a listing of 50 diverse men and women from across Canada with strong competencies that align with the requirements of many Canadian boards.

Richard Sikes | Content Rules

Richard Sikes has been immersed in technical translation and localization for over 30 years. He is passionate about linguistic technologies of all kinds. Richard has managed localization teams at several industry-leading software companies. He contributes frequently to MultiLingual magazine, and he is well-known as a speaker at translation industry events. Richard holds a BA in fine arts from the University of California, Diplom Betriebswirt (FH) from the Fachhochschule Heidelberg, and an MBA from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Pete Smith | University of Texas at Arlington

Pete Smith is Chief Analytics Officer and Professor, University of Texas Arlington, where he has also served as Vice Provost for Digital Teaching and Learning. In more than 25 years at UTA, he also founded the Language Acquisition Center, the Center for Distance Education, and the Learning Innovation and Networked Knowledge (LINK) lab, a learning analytics research laboratory. His teaching and research focuses on cultural theory, big data in education, natural language processing, and translation automation.

Ivan Smolnikov | SmartCAT

Ivan Smolnikov, CEO of SmartCAT.ai, USA. Ivan has a solid track record in the translation industry with a strong focus on linguistic technology development. He started his first translation business in 2004 and built it into one of the Top 50 global LSPs, known today as ABBYY LS, where he worked as the CEO until 2016. In 2013 Ivan co-founded SmartCAT— a cloud full-featured CAT platform that makes collaboration easier for translation service buyers, freelance translators, and LSPs, making growth and business scaling much easier for them. The project turned out to be so successful that after the 50,000th user joined SmartCAT in late 2015, Ivan decided to fully focus on SmartCAT and run the company as a CEO, later in 2016 SmartCAT attracted experienced VC to fuel the growth globally.

David Snider | LinkedIn

David has been involved in languages - both human and machine - for over 20 years, and has built and managed localization teams at Microsoft, Amazon and Linkedin; he is currently focusing on envisioning, building and delivering LinkedIn's future localization system. For more information see his LinkedIn profile!

Daniel Sullivan | Tableau Software

Daniel Sullivan is the Director of Localization at Tableau Software and the integrated systems architect of their shared services Localization Platform. In a previous life, Daniel was a humanities academic in Japanese literature at Stanford University, where he received an MA and completed candidacy requirements for a doctorate, before ultimately abandoning the Ivory Tower for the thrilling adventure in enterprise localization.

Kenji Takaoka | PIJIN Co., Ltd.

Kenji Takaoka is a founder and CEO of Export Japan Inc. He started the business in 2000 when he was a MBA student at Kobe University, changing from his career as a professional boxer. In 2013, while representing Export Japan, he started new venture named QR Translator, a multilingual solution for signage or printed materials. The company, PIJIN Co., Ltd. got investment directly from Mitsui & Co. in 2014. QR Translator is, by now, widely used in many places like Kansai International Airport, Fushimi Shrine and Seven-Elevens as well as on many packages of Japanese products. He is also a member of the board of japan-guide.com and several tourism-related associations.

Justin Thorne | Age of Learning

Alaska-born Justin Thorne has two decades of professional media experience in Japan and the United States, strategizing and developing interactive content and publications for international markets, through his work at Neopets.com, Nickelodeon, Disney, and now Age of Learning, creators of the acclaimed early learning site and app, ABCmouse.com. Outside work, Justin was also responsible for creating a satirical political website during the George W. Bush era, receiving positive reviews and mentions from major publications and content portals worldwide, including features on Yahoo, CBC Radio (Canada) and a “top pick of the 2004 campaign” recognition from Newsweek along with Will Ferrell. Justin devotes a good deal of his time day-to-day straightening out product plans and designs for a global audience, with the guiding principle being to make it right for multiple markets beforehand rather than afterward.

John Tinsley | Iconic Translation Machines

John Tinsley is the CEO and Co-Founder of Iconic Translation Machines. He is an expert in machine translation (MT) technology, a field in which he holds a PhD from Dublin City University. The foundations of Iconic are built on methods that John pioneered over almost a decade of research and development. Prior to founding Iconic, he worked on consulting and development of MT technology for multinational clients across a variety of industries. John also acts as an expert consultant with the European Commission, providing guidance on language technology initiatives.

Marco Trombetti | Translated

Marco Trombetti is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor in innovation. In 1999 he founded Translated and currently serves as CEO. Translated is one of the first internet based translation services with over 50.0000 customers and has created language technologies, such as MyMemory and Matecat, that are used by millions of users every month. In the past, he created a social network whose ad traffic was acquired by Doubleclick (now Google) and Memopal, a cloud storage technology used by two million users worldwide. Marco recently founded Pi Campus, a startup district in Rome for early stage European technology ventures with 13 portfolio investments.

Jaap van der Meer | TAUS

Jaap van der Meer founded TAUS in 2004. He is a language industry pioneer and visionary, who started his first translation company, INK, in The Netherlands in 1980. Jaap is a regular speaker at conferences and author of many articles about technologies, translation and globalization trends.

Erik Vogt | Moravia

Erik Vogt currently manages Moravia’s team of solutions architects. Since starting in localization in 1998, he has supported numerous enterprise localization programs for some of the world’s largest technology companies as a program director, and in various operational leadership roles including managing teams of engineers, project managers, technical services and crowdsourcing teams. He has a passion for contributing to a better understanding of data in the localization business and improving data-driven decision making. Erik has a BA in psychology from Oberlin College and is currently finishing an MBA at WGU. When not traveling, he makes his home in Boulder, Colorado, and enjoys hiking, camping, brewing and woodworking.

Diane Wagner | Microsoft

Alex Waibel | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Dr. Alexander Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He is the director of the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (interACT). The Center’s mission is to develop multimodal and multilingual human communication technologies that improve human-human and human-machine communication. Prof. Waibel's team developed and demonstrated the first speech translation systems in Europe and USA (1990/1991 (ICASSP'91)), the world’s first simultaneous lecture translation system (2005), and Jibbigo, the world’s first commercial speech translator on a phone (2009). Since 2012, his team also deployed the first simultaneous interpretation service for lectures at Universities and interpretation tools at the European Parliament.

Henry Wang | UTH International

Henry Wang is the executive vice president of UTH International, a leading disruptive innovation company in the language technology solutions industry worldwide. Prior to this role, he was president of WordTech International, which was one of the top 30 globalization and language solution providers in Asia (#11) and was ranked #81 globally in 2014. He oversaw the company’s legal, IP, technical and marketing language solutions, as well as the operations of the company’s localization and globalization service offerings and innovation.

Yongpeng Wei | Lingosail

Jack Welde | Smartling

Jack is a technology early-adopter, serial entrepreneur, software patent-holder, product evangelist and combat-decorated Air Force pilot. Before starting Smartling, he served as SVP Product at eMusic and COO/CTO at SheSpeaks and RunTime Technologies. He also co-founded Trio Development, a software company that created the first Personal Information Manager, which was sold to Apple in the mid ’90s. He holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also studied linguistics and interned with Professor William Labov, and a MBA from Cameron University in Germany.

Adam Wooten | Middlebury Institute of International Studies

Carl Yao | CSOFT International

Carl Yao is a technology entrepreneur who is passionate about using technology to enable better global communications. He recently launched Stepes, the world's first chat-based mobile translation app that brings translation to the world’s large bilingual or multilingual population. Before Stepes, Carl created TermWiki, a social knowledge network and the world’s largest terminology cloud, and was the principal architect on the development of the world’s first multilingual speech engine using voice synthesizing. Carl is currently the Executive Vice President at CSOFT International, a global communications company that provide language translation and technology solutions to international businesses.

Yan Yu | Spartan Software

Yan Yu founded Spartan Software in 2008 to create a customer-centric technology company and promote open-source technologies in the localization industry. Before Spartan, he spent seven years at Idiom Technologies and held various technical and management positions. Yan is passionate about lowering the cost of translation automation and accelerating the advancements in translation technology.

George Zhao | Boffin

George Jie Zhao, co-founder and president of Boffin Language Group Inc., an Asian language service provider, is on a mission to develop innovative ideas and practices that will disrupt, in a good way, the changing language industry. Before launching Boffin, George co-founded JJPCB (Ticker: SHE:000027), a PCB manufacturing company. Before that, he worked as a telecommunications engineer and software developer for CAST, the Chinese version of NASA. Over his 25+ years of business experience, he’s also worked as a translator, a localizer, a project manager, an entrepreneur, and an angel investor.

Venue

The TAUS Annual Conference 2016 will be held at the Sentinel, previously called the Governor Hotel where we've held our Annual Conference in 2014 as well. The Governor has undergone some immense renovations over the past year and with it a name change. This year we have the Grand Ballroom reserved for the TAUS Annual Conference.

We've reserved a block of rooms at the Sentinel against a special rate of $ 249 (plus tax). To book your room at the Sentinel, please click on this link. You can also call the hotel directly on this number 888.246.5631. Please make sure to mention that you're booking as part of the TAUS Annual Conference 2016 to make sure you obtain the special rate.

We've also reserved a block of rooms at the sister hotel of the Sentinel, called Hotel DeLuxe. The nightly rate there is $ 209 (plus tax). To book your room at Hotel Deluxe, please click on this link or call the hotel directly at 866.986.8085. Again, make sure you mention the TAUS Annual Conference 2016 to obtain the special rate.

Address of the hotels:

The Sentinel614 Southwest 11th AvenuePortland, OR 97205United States

Hotel DeLuxe729 SW 15th AvePortland, OR 97205United States

Registration fees

Registration fee for the Annual Conference is €1,000 for TAUS members and €2,000 for non-members.

TAUS Haus Band

Rock 'n Roll Dinner with the TAUS HAUS Band

Like last year in San Jose, we are organizing an evening with the TAUS Haus Band! We are inviting all attendees for a vibrant evening with great music and fingerfood. Make sure to be there in time for the special performance of The TAUS HAUS Band. A band formed by five leaders and experts in the localization industry with a passion for music. This is the second time they’re performing together and it is promising to be a rocking evening.

This year's event will take place on Monday 24 October at the Secret Society. The evening will start at 18:30 pm with a dinner sponsored by Lionbridge, followed by a performance of the TAUS Haus Band and guests. Please note that all attendees of the Annual Conference will receive a ticket from the TAUS team to enter the venue.

Open Mic Night

Instead of standing in the spotlight while giving a presentation like you normally do, we invite you to come up to the stage and sing or play with the band. Please complete this form if you're interested in singing or playing a song with the band and the band manager will get in touch with you soon.

Smith "Batman" Yewell has been involved in the Washington, DC music scene for many years, playing both lead and rhythm guitar. In 2012, Smith and some of his colleagues from the office threw together an impromptu band to play at that year’s Christmas party. It wasn’t half bad, so people kept asking when the band would play again. From there followed more gigs, so the office organized a "name the band" contest. The industry-insider name, Fuzzy Match, won out! Who knew that a rock band would be promoting the Locc industry!

Paul 'Harry the Man' Mangell is a long-standing member of the Cambridge music scene playing with local alt-country veterans The Band With No Name, and rock outfit Big Blue Sky. In 2003 he founded The Reverbs, a blues-rockband and plays bass, blues harp and does some Tom Waits inspired lead vocals.

Mimi “Barb Wire” Hills is an acoustic guitarist and bassist, and a veteran of Bay Area bands playing such diverse music as bluegrass, Hawaiian, and the 3Ds (Dylan, Dawg, and Dead).